[Jan 4 2015 - Hello all; I am semi-retired for regular PAD playing and thus I'm likely not available to answer questions on these guides nor will they likely be updated further. These guides are written under the assumption that Starlight Sanctuary's "King of the Gods" level is has the most beneficial rank exp/monster fodder/gold payout combination of any regularly available dungeon in the game and are geared towards getting you there as fast as possible. -J]

Either you’re:

finishing up the Tier 5 Normal dungeons (everything from Hyperion Lava Flow through Ocean of Heaven) and all of the technical dungeons up to the “No leader skill” conditional” dungeon), and itching to comfortably tackle both Hera Descended and Heroes Descended the moment you feel okay doing so

not remotely at this point yet but curious as to what awaits you

way beyond this point and reading this with a raised eyebrow thinking, “Everything this guy is doing is out to lunch, I’m going to go farm some Pengdras immediately then do my daily 5 min run of Legendary Earth”

takes you into the very late game (super end game dungeons on normal and conditional, escalated difficulty descends),

helps grow your stamina at a good clip

have a bunch of max levelled monsters to show for it

“Should I run a collab?” - the late game version
The new (short) answer is: whenever you feel like doing it and have a team composition that makes sense for it.

Additionally: now that you are in late game mode your focus in collabs also shifts slightly from simply getting monsters with skills that plug holes to getting monsters that can effectively “skill up” your monsters. e.g. farming Nagas from Scarlet Snake Princess, feeding them to an Echidna for a chance of lowering the number of turns it takes to bust out Echidna’s active skill. This sort of thing really hasn’t mattered in the early game and mid-game (hence why I never mentioned it) but as you get into the late and end-game you will find needing only 5 turns to activate a skill vs. 11 is a very big difference. If you are interested in more details around skilling up, there's an excellent guide already written here.

My personal opinion is to not waste time on skillups that are exceptionally time-consuming or hold little value to your team. Echidna and Siren’s skillups are incredibly valuable not simply because of their constant presence on late or end-game teams but because they are incredibly *easy* to farm. On the flip side, you’re not likely to get much out of Ra being able to bust out his 7777 attack a couple of turns faster *and* you have to evolve every single Bane you farmed in order to do so.

Box size in the late game

Again, this is generally up to you (and also corresponds with how much evo material you save or stockpile) but I generally like to have about 100 spaces of box space free at any time (mostly so that when you are farming, you can race through levels without having to deal with the “your box is full” message). Others like 50 free spaces. Whatever your total box size is, you should have some comfortable "working space".

The evolution of farming evo materials

Those of you who were following the mid-game guide will have noticed that the Wednesday expert level and the Friday expert level have disappeared from the schedule. This is because with the new levels accessible to you, the following materials are *specifically* farmable:

Divine Mask - they have a chance of dropping in the corresponding colored T5 normal dungeon (so you’ll likely end up with some just from your weekly runs). Also, the RGB divine masks have a near guaranteed chance of dropping in the appropriate floor of the “No Leader Skills” conditional dungeon on Mondays, as the tech dungeons are on 1.5x drop and the 6th level of each of those dungeons is an attack by 3 of those masks.

Mystic Mask - Ocean of Heaven on Saturday and Sunday (1.5x drop)

Dragon Fruit - Tower Of the Sky on Saturday and Sunday (1.5x drop)

Colored Dub-Mythlits - each one of these shows up as a rare drop in the corresponding color of the T3 technical dungeons (Hypno Forest through to Hill of Iris' Rainbow).

While you may go through more stamina to get one of these, you will also get *WAY* more rank experience and fodder experience running through the technicals to get one of these guys and as a result they are far more efficient for you to run overall.

The only evo materials that still require a Wednesday run are the evo and demon masks. The evo masks do not have a dungeon that is ever on a 1.5x drop rate so your chance of getting one is actually *better* in the Wednesday beginner dungeon. The demon masks have dungeons on 1.5x drop rate (Fire Forest Nerva -> Castle of Satan), but you don't want to be wasting your time there when you can be running the T5. The rank exp you'll get from a Normal dungeon T3 is abysmal. It’s better to simply run the beginner dungeon for 10 stamina and hopefully get the masks you require there, stockpiling the remainder for later.

Likewise, if you need the low-level spirits, it’s more efficient stamina-wise on Fridays to simply run the beginner dungeon to get what you need and stockpile the remainder rather than grind the very first levels on half-stamina days.

“But what if I desperately need [insert advanced mask or spirit material here]?” You shouldn’t; you’re stockpiling! Obviously if you feel like wasting your stamina on it, it’s totally your business but at this point you should have all of the material you need for an evolution on hand.

The “pengdra cycle” and why you shouldn’t bother with it

Many users of the game (and I used to be one of them) used to run something called the pengdra cycle, which is this:

Run the early technical levels on Mondays, when all technicals recieve a 1.5x drop rate

Save the pengdras you get from running these levels in your box

Run the limited time “X color dragons descended” to get the dragons necessary to evolve them

Run the Thursday dungeon to collect dragon plants (the other element in evolving the pengdras)

Feed the monsters

Those of you who read through the mid-game guide (or skipped ahead to this one) have noticed I don’t include running the pengdra cycle in these schedules. That is because while the pengdra cycle sounds like a fast way to level your monsters, in reality it is an *incredible* waste of both your box space and your stamina. This is precisely how Gungho would like you to play, because extra box space beyond a certain point costs you stones, and the less stamina you have the more likely you are to use a stone to refill it if there’s a level you want to play.

Suzuteo’s Guide to Physical Teams (which completely changed the way I play and will change the way you play as well) discusses this in more detail, but essentially you have a choice in the game of what to be farming. You can:
1) Farm monsters
2) Farm monster experience
3) Farm stamina/rank, and thus farm *game time*.

This time/stamina actually allows you to run *more* of #1 and #2 when you want to, because you will rank up far faster than you would otherwise. Thus, this guide (and in fact, the two preceding chapters) are geared towards the most efficient growing of your stamina on a daily basis while still giving you the ability to level up your monsters relatively quickly (see “levelling your monsters the real man (or woman) way”, below).

While all of this advice (and guides) were written prior to Pengdras not giving as much experience (previously it was 9000 on-color and 6000 off-color), and being harder to evolve (they only need dragon plants and seeds, whereas they used to require a matching color metal dragon), the advice still applies - Pengdra Village is very valuable to run but the actual cycle still is not beneficial enough to you to be anything more than a distraction.

Levelling your monsters the real man (or woman) way

The T5 dungeons on 1.5x drop rates are great. They have a great ratio of +eggs, they regularly drop king metal dragons, and they have some of best rank exp/stamina ratios in the game.

The fodder that drops in these dungeons happens to be ideal for levelling monsters all the way up to about level 60-70. As well, occasionally a King Metal Dragon will also drop which can be used to level your dark monsters once they go beyond the fodder-feeding threshold. This is the method that a famous non-IAP player used to hit rank 466 (!!!) on PAD.

More importantly than the above, however: they are incredibly easy to blow through with a sufficiently levelled everyday farming team. Not only are you wiping these dungeons and gaining a ton of feeding material, but you will not have to spend 5 hours doing it either (which is great for refilling your stamina pool for the following day).

The final levels of Ocean of Heaven and Tower To The Sky have all of the benefits listed above along with one other one: they provide the second and third highest gold/stamina ratio of any normal dungeon in the game next to the highest difficulty Weekend Tricolor Dungeons. Thus they now replace the Tricolor dungeon on the weekend schedule except in certain specific situations.

The key to levelling using this fodder is to ensure your gold pool doesn’t deplete significantly from the feeding. The easiest way to do this is to ensure that the experience gained by feeding a monster is roughly equivalent to the gold spent.

To help make it easy for you to keep track of how to level your monsters, here’s the simplified distillation:

If the target monster is level 30 or less, feed them the matching color T5 fodder straight (everything dropping from a T5/OOH is 3000 exp minimum).

If the target monster is between level 30 and level 55, feed the T5 fodder monster one other matching color fodder monster and then feed that fodder to the target. (e.g. feed a Marine Goblin to an Ice Ogre and feed the Ice Ogre to the target).

If the target monster is between level 55 and level 70, you can either:

feed the matching color T5 fodder monster two other matching color fodder monsters and then feed that fodder to the target. (e.g. feed a Samurai Goblin and a Ruby Carbuncle to a Samurai Ogre, feed that Ogre to the target)

skip straight to the "level 70 and above" levelling guidance if you find levelling from 60 to 70 this way takes too long/costs too much gold. Totally up to you (as is everything in this guide, but I digress...)

If the target monster is between level 70 and 90, feed it only one of the following to level it further:

a matching or non-matching color level 10 unevolved pengdra

a matching or non-matching evolved pengdra (don't bother running the cycle for this, I am referring to drops either from other dungeons or from Pengdra Village)

a matching or non-matching level 10 moltdra (now dropping from the PAL machine with fair regularity)

a matching or non-matching king or super king metal dragon

If the target monster is a light monster *and* you have mystic masks to spare, you can feed it a mystic mask (15K experience). You'll eventually wind up with a boatload of these if you are farming Ocean of Heaven every weekend. Trust me, I regularly score a number of them each week just by playing Ocean of Heaven (see “evolution of farming evo materials” below.

From a T5/OOH fodder priority standpoint, the best monsters to feed to targets are, in order:

Ogres

Knights

Demons

Carbuncle

Goblin

Other people have done a *whole* lot of math so that people like you and I don't really have to. If you want to nerd out over statistics like this, please go here to have a look at this incredibly detailed work!

"Can I spend stones now?" - the answer you've been waiting for

In the previous two guides I advised spending a *minimal* amount of stones, and now you get to find out why. Behold:

The most powerful farmable team in the game

Then you pair the team with a friend leader Lu Bu and you now have one of the most powerful entirely farmable teams in the entire game. Not only that, but you don't need any high level rare evo materials to get this team either, just the standard ones.

I can't take credit for this brilliant team composition, as that needs to go to jesrockz' post on these forums that discusses it in detail. In the bonus section I go into detail discussing why this team is so good and alternatives to it. However, this team is powerful enough to farm King of Gods and as you might have guessed, if it's powerful enough to farm King of Gods it's also powerful enough to easily beat:
the Mystic Stone Dragon dungeons
the Technical Mech Dragon dungeons
everything in T5/T6 Normals
many of the descends

If you do not have a team as powerful as this one, then this is the team you need to be building as it will literally be your most important team in the game.

What does this all have to do with spending stones?

Satan's dungeon is a no-RCV dungeon and the monsters hit hard enough that you will need a 9x attack build of some sort to at least stand a chance. Given Satan's 6 million HP you also would benefit heavily from bringing in a team with color advantage. However in the majority of cases 0-stoning the dungeon without either:
a) +egging several members
b) bringing an Echidna or other delay in with your team

ranges from difficult to impossible. And if you have to +egg a team to beat Satan that - trust me on this - you may throw me almost immediately after getting 2 Satans, it's not worth the time investment to get those +eggs. You're better off spending a couple of stones to get Satan and then building that team to get +eggs from Starlight Sanctuary or elsewhere.

I am aware that some of you reading this advice are all, "Spend stones to continue?! I would *never*!!" but Satan as a lead is more powerful than about 80% of the monsters in the rare egg machine. That includes some of the god pantheon monsters. Would you prefer to spend 15 stones to get Neptune, a Toy Dragon, and a Golem or spend 5 stones to get a leader you will be using for most of the game along with one of the key subs (Vampire) as a guaranteed drop?

Remember, the goal here is to get to King of the Gods as fast as possible. Build one team to do that and you can then build any team you feel like *easily*. Trust me. I started a new game, rolled the REM only once, and got to King of Gods in under two months of gameplay with no REM monsters at all. If I can do that without the REM *and* without any skill, I'm pretty sure you can pull this sucker off.

2. The weekly late game schedule

Assumptions

The late game guide assumes two things:

you have a decently levelled everyday farming team - if you don’t, spend some time building one up through pengdra levelling so that you don't have to do pengdra levelling anymore =)

you have the monster levels, rank, and team composition necessary to beat any Super X Dragons Descended (see “Super Dragon Teams” in the midgame guide). If you don’t, ignore #2 on Monday through Sunday until you do.

What “running the appropriate T5” means

Monday through Friday in the schedule below have a listing for “run the appropriate T5 level”. This is shorthand for

1) finding the T5 Normal dungeon that is on a 1.5x drop rate.

They rotate through 2 a day from Monday to Friday, going Fire->Water->Wood->Light->Dark - e.g. Monday morning has Hyperion Lava Flow at 1.5x, while Oceanus Falls is at 1.5x Monday evening. Note that there is a 1 hour overlap where *both* dungeons for the day are listed at 1.5x, so if you are fortunate enough to have that hour free, you can choose which color dungeon you want to run.

2) choosing the appropriate level of the dungeon for your current party strength. Your choices in descending order, should be:

The boss level - this provides you with an average of 6-8 monsters per run (there are bosses at level 9 and level 10) and a very high rank exp/stamina ratio. However, your farming team may not be powerful enough to take down the bosses of the Wood, Light and Dark dungeons before they kill you (around 50 or so, they will be) as those bosses are on short timers. Without sufficient spike power you’ll need to substitute a poison or defense-break monster to tackle Ifrit in Hyperion Lava Flow.

The first level - this provides you with 5-6 monsters per run as there is only one boss level.

A quick note on T5 vs. T6
As discussed in the earlier guides, the T6 dungeons are generally too difficult for a rainbow farming team to handle unless at least one of the leads has a color advantage (and/or you have very specific subs with specific skills that will allow you to beat the sub-boss and boss). If you have a team that is powerful enough and you need dub-mythlits more than you need divine masks, run the T6 in place of the T5s below and forget about running the technical dungeons on Monday to get evo material.

[As usual, all listings in the weekly schedule are ranked by priority]

Legendary Dragons - some of the best levels in the game

The addition of the Legendary Dragon dungeons are a *huge* benefit to this cycle for several reasons:
* obviously, they drop the Legendary Dragons
* all of the fodder that drops is strictly one color
* the dungeons *also* drop all of the healer girls (the corresponding one for each color) on a decent basis
* and all of the mystic knights can show up here.

You should be running the Legendary Dragon levels as soon as you have a team capable of doing so, and running them in place of the T5s unless either:
a) you already have all of the mystic knights and all of the healer girls
b) you need the evo material that the T5s drop

Monday

Run any collabs or limited time dungeons if desired

If there’s a “Super X Dragons Descended”, run this instead of anything below

Run Pengdra village if it shows up

If you need any dub-mythlit color, run the appropriate T3 technical dungeon boss level until one drops

If you are in need of an RGB divine mask, run the appropriate level of the Forbidden Tower if you’ve enabled it

If you are in need of any other divine mask (or you haven’t enabled the conditional dungeon yet), run the corresponding color T1 technical dungeon level until it drops

If you urgently need a mythlit, run any T1 technical dungeon boss level until it drops (but I’d wait for Friday)

Run as many technical dungeons as you can until you have completed them up to the first 3 levels of the “No Leader Skills” conditional dungeon.

Run the appropriate level of either the Legendary Dragons, or for whichever T5 Normal dungeon is marked 1.5x

If there’s no T5 Normal dungeon enabled at 1.5x, run whatever Legendary Dragon dungeon you still need a Healer Girl or Mystic Knight from, and if you already have all of them, just pick the color you most need fodder experience for.

Tuesday

Run any collabs or limited time dungeons if desired

If there’s a “Super X Dragons Descended”, run this instead of anything below

Run Pengdra village if it shows up

If you need a Keeper of Rainbow and the drop rate is 2x, run the “Keeper of Rainbow” Tuesday dungeon.

If you have a team capable of running the RGB Keeper levels, run these dungeons until you have your “comfortable stockpile” of Keeper material

Run the appropriate level of either the Legendary Dragons, or for whichever T5 Normal dungeon is marked 1.5x

If there’s no T5 Normal dungeon enabled at 1.5x, run whatever Legendary Dragon dungeon you still need a Healer Girl or Mystic Knight from, and if you already have all of them, just pick the color you most need fodder experience for.

Wednesday

Run any collabs or limited time dungeons if desired

If there’s a “Super X Dragons Descended”, run this instead of anything below

Run Pengdra village if it shows up

If you are in need of an evo mask, light demon mask, dark demon mask, or need to stockpile, run the Beginner Wednesday Dungeon level

Run the appropriate level of either the Legendary Dragons, or for whichever T5 Normal dungeon is marked 1.5x

If there’s no T5 Normal dungeon enabled at 1.5x, run whatever Legendary Dragon dungeon you still need a Healer Girl or Mystic Knight from, and if you already have all of them, just pick the color you most need fodder experience for.

Thursday

Run any collabs or limited time dungeons if desired

If there’s a “Super X Dragons Descended”, run this instead of anything below

Run Pengdra village if it shows up

If you are in urgent need of a dragon seed, plant, or flower, run the Thursday Dungeon level if it is on 2x drop

Run the appropriate level of either the Legendary Dragons, or for whichever T5 Normal dungeon is marked 1.5x

If there’s no T5 Normal dungeon enabled at 1.5x, run whatever Legendary Dragon dungeon you still need a Healer Girl or Mystic Knight from, and if you already have all of them, just pick the color you most need fodder experience for.

Friday

Run any collabs or limited time dungeons if desired

If there’s a “Super X Dragons Descended”, run this instead of anything below

Run Pengdra village if it shows up

If you are in urgent need of a low spirit, mythlit, or need to stockpile, run the Beginner Friday Dungeon level

Run the appropriate level of either the Legendary Dragons, or for whichever T5 Normal dungeon is marked 1.5x

If there’s no T5 Normal dungeon enabled at 1.5x, run whatever Legendary Dragon dungeon you still need a Healer Girl or Mystic Knight from, and if you already have all of them, just pick the color you most need fodder experience for.

Saturday/Sunday

Run any collabs or limited time dungeons if desired

If there’s a “Super X Dragons Descended”, run this instead of anything below

Run Pengdra village if it shows up

Finish Tower to the Sky and Ocean of Heaven if they are available and you haven't completed them yet

If you have less than 1,000,000 gold run the Tricolor Weekend Dungeon until you have 2,000,000 gold

If you are in need of Dragon Fruits, run Tower to The Sky - Beautiful Being until you have enough

Run Ocean of Heaven - Sea God of Heaven over and over again.

3. Levels to look out for

Ifrit in Hyperion Lava Flow’s boss level and Neptune in Ocean of Heaven’s boss level will require either:
* a defense break monster that reduces defense by a very significant amount
* poison
* a spike team capable of doing enough damage to offset their armor (which is ultimately what you prefer, but may require some levelling to do so)

Otherwise you’ll be there all day if they simply don’t just kill you before you can kill them.

Every other boss is simply a case of levelling your monsters up and having a good team composition for the dungeon.

4. Late game teams to build

[note: “farming team” and “everyday farming team are copied from the mid-game guide. If you're read this before, skip this section and jump down to the "Hera" and "Heroes" sections as there's nothing new to see.]

“Farming team”

You’ll find many definitions of “farming team” in the forums, but for this guide a “farming team” means a team that can capably *blow through* a dungeon in 5-10 minutes total if not less. if your team takes 30-45 min to beat Keeper of Rainbow for the first time (and many of you will, it’s like a rite of passage) that is not considered a “farming” build for Keeper of Rainbow, for example. =)

The “everyday” farming team

The “everyday” farming team is defined as a team that can farm:
every normal dungeon up to the end of the T5 normals
every technical dungeon up to the beginning of the conditionals

This team - along with the team that can run Super Metal Dragons, - is one of the two most important teams to build in the game as together they will be the teams that you spend about 70-90% of your time using.

The absolute *best* everyday farming team - in my opinion only - is one with an attack multiplier based on the *type* of monster, no HP conditional, ideally enough HP to survive *one* significant hit (about 9-10K) and a rainbow set of monsters such that every color is covered off significantly. This is for several reasons:

you can’t lose the attack bonus if you lose or gain HP

you are not limited to one color in play, which is great because...

at higher levels, matching 5 orbs of any color will blow away everything on every floor except an ogre, and hitting the weakness color of the ogre will blow him away as well

there are no conditions on matching several colors of orbs, so zero chance of being “orb trolled” (where one or more colors of orbs don’t show up when you need them to)

at higher levels, comboing either:

2 sets of 3 orbs and another set of non-matching (e.g. 2 sets of 3 green orbs + 2 of red)

3 sets of 3 orbs of the same color

will blow through the defense of almost *anything* it attacks if the monster is weak to that color (e.g. two sets of 3 fire orbs + 1 set of 3 dark orbs will kill a divine mask outright). This includes a couple of monsters that show up in the T5 Normal dungeons, covered below.

That being said, a 12.25x HP conditional attack team (such as say, a Light or Dark Metatron team, Goemon team, Zeus team) is still a great potential everyday farming team, If you have a team like this ready-made or easily made, then go for it. Some things to be aware of:
* The 12.25x will likely kill anything before you can ever take a hit
* If you do take a hit you should have a good way to heal back up or you're likely toast (possibly an awakened autohealer or two)
* Ideally your team has the ability to bust out all of its skills in the final round to one shot the boss (otherwise you run a huge risk on the boss stage of Clayus Prison or Rhemis Temple, as the bosses there are on a 2 timer and a 1 timer, respectively)

You should be working towards building some sort of everyday farming team (and it might even be the one you currently are running) when you first get an opportunity.

It’s possible to race through the game with combo-based gods as well and the attack multipliers they supply (which also gives you a great deal of team flexibility), but they are not quite as braindead simple as the everyday team I have listed above, which is ideal if you have limited time to play and a large stamina pool.

However, depending on your box content, you may not have access to this sort of team at this point (don’t worry - you will...the 9x ADKZ and Valkyrie have special event dungeons that show up on a regular basis, and all of the subs needed to make a rainbow team for them can be farmed or drop from the PAL machine). If not, a 2/4/2 mono team can carry you through (albiet slightly slower). You don’t actually *need* this team for the midgame, but you will for the late game unless you’d prefer to run the pengdra cycle (and you don’t), so it’s best to start preparing it now.

A note on rainbow teams and late game content
As discussed above, rainbow teams will take you through the T5s and in fact will also take you through Legendary Dragons and the Sky Dragon levels. However for the T6 levels and other levels of any significant difficulty, you will likely need to branch off into a "mono-color" or bi-color team with a significant multiplier and some orb changers or you are going to find the going *really* hard, regardless of how many +eggs your team carries. Use the rainbow team to clear the T5s and Legendary efficiently until you can build up a good mono-color team *or* if you have the monsters for it, to build up your KOG-clearing team (any team that can clear KOG can clear the T6s and a host of other content).

King Carnival team
King Carnival is a variant of the Super Dragons Descended dungeon, with a couple of notable differences:

There are only 4 rounds

The Dragons will show up as any of the 5 colors - no primary color focus

You fight either 2 Kings at once, or a King and a Super together

There are no multi-hits

However the Kings and Supers hit for a ton of damage

given the above, you are looking at taking either 3300 or 7621 damage a round

Strategies to get by this level are thus slightly different than the advice given in the mid-game guide for Super Dragons Descended. Resist dragons no longer work as leads here because the dragons are of multiple colors, and the slow ogre build no longer works at all unless you decide to make a rainbow team of max-evoed ogres (and no sane human being will construct that, I assure you). Likewise, a healer+Odin build will likely get you killed if a Super shows up because you will not be able to heal back from the 2 hits fast enough.

Ideally, you are facing this dungeon down with one of two teams:

a highly-levelled spike team with a damage multiplier of 16x or above (which does run the risk of getting orb trolled for one of the levels)

the poison/defense break subs approach given for Super Dragons, except instead of the resist+healer leads, using two high-level and awoken healers as the leads, which will ensure that even if facing down a Super Dragon on round 1, you'll survive as long as you match orbs.

The focus for a non-spike team is to simply survive round 1 long enough to store your active skills, then whip through them round by round by round. This is similar to how Super Dragons work as well.

“Hera Descended” team

Hera is one of the most significant monsters in the game for a couple of reasons:

she has an active skill that reduces a monster’s HP by 30% regardless of defense. While this skill doesn’t mean much in the early and mid game, it is easily one of the powerful active skills in the late and end game, where boss monsters can start with millions of HP and one shot of gravity can do upwards of 1,000,000 damage.

fully levelled up, she has equivalent HP to a Keeper of Rainbow with 3x the RCV, 1.5x the attack, and a tremendously more effective active skill (so she can effectively replace one on your high HP dark team members).

I advise getting between 3-4 Heras for potential team use (read: favorited and not used for skill up) regardless of how long the dungeon takes you to run at this point. In fact, the moment Hera drops you’ll probably want to use one in subsequent go-rounds simply so that you have a gravity power to make the Hera fight go faster.

This guide does not go into the teams you should build to get Hera as we’ll be here all day, but I’ll point you to a coupleof threads discussing Hera strategies so you can get a feel for the kind of team you should be assembling. It’s important to note that you will likely need at least one member of your team to be poison-capable or else Neptune (showing up in round 6) will be a very long grind, and many teams require a member with 50% dark resistance.

I'd also point you to the excellent guide on "Non-REM Descend Strategies". If you happen to have monsters from the REM that are better suited, by all means use them and they'll make it even easier; but this shows you entirely farmable teams for Hera *and* the dungeon below...

“Two Heroes” team

The completion of Two Heroes nets you one of two monsters: Berserk or Highlander. Aside from the very useful active skill of changing hearts into blue or green orbs, the ultimate evolutions of either of these monsters can form the basis of a very powerful everyday farming team (potentially more powerful than the ADKZ template discussed in the mid-game guide). They are listed below:

9x attack balanced build: All of the mystic knights except Fenrir (Ice) have a survey dungeon; so Fenrir has to come from the REM or as a drop on a descend. However, you can substitute in the Barons (highest evolution of the normal knights that drop in literally almost every level) for whichever of the mystic knights you're missing and simply stick the mystic knights in place once they show up. Note: It is possible to swap in ult evo'd Fenrir (Ice) as the lead and then ADKZ in Fenrir's spot, but given he's even rarer to find than Cu Chu you're more likely to have scored Cu Chu first.

9x attack Physical build: Your RCV is absolutely terrible but let's be real: when *mid*-level this team has 15K hp and at high level something like 25K +, *without* a modifier, so you likely won't need it. That's without considering that you also have two monsters on the team with the skill of "cut damage in half". Red and green golems are farmable (and drop from the PAL machine), and the light and dark ones have their own survey dungeon. More likely you'll have gotten them as "booby prize" rolls in the REM before you get them through other means.

Get 2 of each so that you have the ability to choose between an unconditional 9x multiplier or a 12.25x depending on the situation, or simply to have an additional one as support on a team.

A discussion of Physical/Balance teams is out of the scope of this guide, but I’ll point you to a couple of references that have gone into *laborious* detail regarding potential teams that you can construct to beat them:

"Beyond the T5s" - how everything changes once you hit King of the Gods, and how to get there

King of the Gods - what's the big deal?
The most important level in the entire game by a wide margin is King of the Gods - Starlight Sanctuary. For one thing, it's the "final" level of the Normal dungeons except for Legendary Earth, but more importantly it has far and away the best rank exp/stamina ratio in the entire game, one of the best gold payouts in the game, and all-color monster fodder that has such high levels on drop that it can be fed to your monsters straight up to level 70. Once you are at this point, reliably levelling up any monster is no longer an issue. Everything you are doing in the game (and what these guides are written for) is to get you there.

The rank/exp stam is so good on King of the Gods that you will routinely find on starting the game that you will be able to run King of the Gods and level yourself up before you run out of stamina on it. The following table shows common situations where if you have at least this much stamina and need this much rank experience or less to rank up, it is more beneficial for you to run King of the Gods and level up first than it is for you to run anything else.

Stamina

Rank Exp

17 or greater

13K or less

34 or greater

26K or less

51 or greater

39K or less

68 or greater

52K or less

85 or greater

65K or less

102 or greater

78K or less

This also means that KOG effectively gives you a great deal of what I call "free runs". For example, let's say I have 118 stamina and I need 50K exp to rank up. If I am KOG-capable, that means I've essentially got 50 stamina to spend *for free*, because if I just ran KOG straight away I would rank up and still have 50 stamina remaining. This makes it an essential "anchor point" for whatever you're doing.

Now, as you'd expect from a dungeon with this many benefits, it's actually fairly difficult (and debatably more difficult than Hera or Heroes). The first 7 levels are fine. However, the last 3 levels feature in sequence:

A Tiamat that hits for 14K damage every 2 turns, which is enough to almost wipe out everything but a very high levelled or HP multiplying team. Beating him brings you to..

A high damage Chaos Devil Dragon that hits for 24K damage every 2 turns. which means for almost every team in the game you will have to kill it either before it hits you or (in the case of an exceptionally high HP team) you can take one hit before you have to kill it. This isn't really anything different than you get from the final boss of most of the T6 dungeons, but then *after* you fight this guy, you get...

Zeus - who starts on a 1 turn timer, hits for 25K HP *every turn*, and has 5.5 million hit points. Depending on where you are in the game, this is likely the monster with the most or second-most hit points you will have fought to date.

Beating KOG on a regular basis

Realistically, to beat/farm King of the Gods you should have a team that:
a) can either fight Tiamat normally without activating any skills and heal back from his hits
b) either kill the Chaos Devil Dragon before it attacks or can tank one attack from it and then kill it, preferably using as little skills as possible
c) can either kill Zeus in one shot or have both a monster with a skill that delays turns and enough damage output to kill him entirely in those turns.

Overwhelmingly due to c) you will most likely need to either field a 25x or above multiplier team or a team with color advantage (meaning the majority if not all will need to be dark monsters).

There are many teams that fit this criteria but for the purposes of this guide I'm going to assume you didn't get *any* decent monster from the Rare Egg Machine and have to work entirely with what the game will give you, so I will point you to the team described in jesrocks guide, replicated below:

The most powerful farmable team in the game, part 2

Just showing it again because I love looking at it...

I've gone into many of the advantages that this team has way above, but it's most important usage is as a stable build for clearing King of the Gods. This also gives you a baseline with which to construct your own KOG farming team if you have rare monsters; obviously, the more powerful your monster box is, the more powerful the team you can build.
Some sample substitutions:
* A Sonia of any color for either CDD or Wicked Lady (which pretty much guarantees both significant row damage + additional enhances)
* Gryps Rider Vector Finn for any of the orb changers
* Persephone for Wicked Lady
* (although farmable) Dark Armor Gravis (once skilled up) to sub out Vampire for *way* more HP and ATK

All of these options (and that's not even counting the ultimate evos of Satan) simply make an already powerful team even *more* powerful. It's ridiculous.

And yes, I'm aware that if you have a Red Sonia you might be considering running her paired up with Lu Bu. My team of choice on my main account has been Lu Bu + Persephone + Gryps Rider + Dark Mechdragon Hadar + Loki + Red Sonia and I've never lost. But aside from Hadar every other one of those options came from the Rare Egg Machine, so if you don't have the same luck the Satan-based team is more than viable.

"But I've got an autohealer + Odin - can't I use that to cheese past the dungeon?"
Autohealers+Odin or a double Lucifer build can work to clear it once, but they simply take too long for regular farming to take place - and trust me, this level is where 90% of your PAD time will be spent even after you get a very high rank (due to the ratio rank-up effect I described earlier) so it's in your best interest to have a team that can do it in 10 minutes or less. I have seen people who have used Ra leads to steamroll past KOG in 5 min - if you can do that, *fantastic*, then just use Ra. I'm not that Ra player.

Trust me on this, once you hit high ranks you run the danger of running out of time to play before you run out of stamina - it's in your best interest to have a team that can kill these dungeons swiftly.

How everything changes

So this guide's daily guidance becomes significantly different once you can reliably run King of the Gods. Here it is:

Every day
1) If you meet the King of Gods ratio (see above), burn the excess stamina off and then run KOG.
2) If you need evo material, run Normal or Technical dungeons that will drop that keeper.
3) If there's a collab you want to run, go for it.
4) If a Super Dragon shows up and you have a corresponding character lvl 70 or above that you want to level up, go ahead.
5) If Pengdra Village shows up, run it.
6) Otherwise run King of the Gods.

Done. Does it get any easier?

Okay, not *quite* done
And just in case you *really* want to be told what to do, here's the strategy for end game beyond KOG when you think you're up to it:

Weekdays:
1) If you meet the King of Gods ratio (see above), burn the excess stamina off and then run KOG.
2) If you need evo material, run the corresponding Normal or Technical dungeons to get that evo material, or run the corresponding weekday dungeon if it is 2x drop.
3) If there's a collab you want to run, go for it.
4) If a Super Dragon shows up and you have a corresponding character lvl 70 or above that you want to level up, go ahead.
5) If Pengdra Village shows up, run it.
6) Otherwise buy one of the coin dungeons with a better exp/stam ratio to King of the Gods and run that till you're out of stamina.

Weekends:
1) If you meet the King of Gods ratio (see above), burn the excess stamina off and then run KOG.
2) If there's a collab you want to run, go for it.
3) If a Super Dragon shows up and you have a corresponding character lvl 70 or above that you want to level up, go ahead.
4) If Pengdra Village shows up, run it.
5) If the Tricolor Weekend Dungeon is on 2x drop, run it till you are out of stamina
6) Run King of the Gods till you're out of stamina.

And after this:

Whatever you like.

There's no real guide to anything beyond this because if you have a team that can run King of Gods, you don't need a guide (and in fact you likely stopped referring to this one a while ago =) ).

But this - like everything in the game - is totally up to you. This just happened to be what worked best for me after a lot of trial and error, and I hope it helps you out as well!! Feel free to take what works for you and throw out what doesn’t.

Thanks a ton for your time, indulgence, and patience! I sincerely hope that these guides help you out and hopefully make your game more productive the way mine was when I started following this pattern!

Good guide! Would have been wayyy more helpful if this was out when I first started playing.. Already beaten all the techs (even the conditionals) and all the normals :/

"The absolute *best* everyday farming team - in my opinion only - is one with an attack multiplier based on the *type* of monster, no HP conditional, and a rainbow set of monsters such that every color is covered off significantly. This is for several reasons:

you can’t lose the attack bonus if you lose or gain HP
you are not limited to one color in play, which is great because..."

Just a quick note on these two things. I use L. Meta/D. Meta for farming and honestly it is better than Valk/Chu Chu. Faster, dual types so I don't orb exhaust. Much faster bursting (unless your unconditional team is all level maxed, but why have a team just for farming?) My Meta teams are useful for descends as well

I think this is closer to mid game rather than late game. Late game would be descend farming status and farming + eggs when there are no descends. Might sound better to change it to Late-Mid game. Just me nitpicking here.

Banishhed: that's a good point. I'll add something to the effect that if you are running a 12.25x team there's an increased likelihood you are never put in a position to have your HP decrease at this stage of the game. I'd still argue for a rainbow team simply for the brainlessness of it but there's definitely multiple approaches to farming, and a bonus if you can take the same team into a descend.

Vorpal: Probably just my term for "super late-game"/"end-game" being unclear. Your "late game" is my "end game". =) I'll definitely make that clearer in these guides and add a note about "late-mid" game.

Once you're farming descends and farming +eggs it's pretty much a different world entirely, with practically all of the regular game content completed and only the descends and new collabs to be running/farming, hence my rationale for the "end game" terminology.

under "Monday" item #7, "If you urgently need a mythlit, run any T1 technical dungeon first level until it drops (but I’d wait for Wednesday)," did you mean Friday??

Great guide, but do people actually run T3 techs for dub-lits? 16 Stamina for 10 Battles just for a chance at a rare appearance seems sketchy when compared to Friday Dungeon where 25 stamina guarantees you an appearance.

under "Monday" item #7, "If you urgently need a mythlit, run any T1 technical dungeon first level until it drops (but I’d wait for Wednesday)," did you mean Friday??

Great guide, but do people actually run T3 techs for dub-lits? 16 Stamina for 10 Battles just for a chance at a rare appearance seems sketchy when compared to Friday Dungeon where 25 stamina guarantees you an appearance.

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Depends. If you're in desperate need and it happens to be a Monday where you don't need fire/water dub it can be worth it. I will say, dub appearances aren't as rare as mask appearances in techs.

under "Monday" item #7, "If you urgently need a mythlit, run any T1 technical dungeon first level until it drops (but I’d wait for Wednesday)," did you mean Friday??

Great guide, but do people actually run T3 techs for dub-lits? 16 Stamina for 10 Battles just for a chance at a rare appearance seems sketchy when compared to Friday Dungeon where 25 stamina guarantees you an appearance.

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Hey Tony,

I did mean Friday I'll correct that.

I definitely run the T3 techs for chances at dublits. Here's the logic I use when doing so:

a) way better rank exp - it's literally almost 40 times as much rank exp/stamina for Goddess in Paradise (392 exp/stamina) as it is for the Friday dungeon (10 exp/stamina)
b) way better gold: Goddess in Paradise is 1533 gold per stamina vs. 16 per stamina
c) the other drops on the Goddess in Paradise level allow me to level the monsters I've got while the other drops in Friday Expert are good for evo material and not much else (after 10 sapphlits I honestly don't need any more in my box )

If I'm desperate I can certainly run the Friday dungeon but in those cases I am reliant on either:
a) a dublit invade
b) a dublit to be the drop on the last level (1/3 chance on a 2x drop event, even less if I'm not running it on that day)

For sure if you get a dublit drop in Expert Friday (or are lucky enough to have an invade *and* a drop on the last level) then it looks somewhat more efficient.

How about the situation though where you've spent 50 stamina and no dublit has dropped at all?

When that happens in Goddess of Paradise on a 1.5x drop, you'll have run it three times, and will have:
* somewhere between 18-24 fodder monsters (potentially including an evolved pengdra)
* 18,816 more rank experience (48*392)
* 73,854 more gold (48*1,533)

When this happens on Wednesday Expert, you'll have run it twice and gotten:
* 6-10 evo materials that you might be able to save, but aren't useful for feeding (this is good though if you want to stockpile)
* no fodder monsters
* 500 more rank exp (10*50)
* 800 more gold (16*50)

It's different in the mid-game, where
a) your big priority is essentially getting a highly evo'd team together so that you can start ranking up all over the place
b) you're debatably not powerful enough to reliably run Goddess of Rainbow
c) you likely don't have as much evo material stockpiled

at that point, sure, running the Friday dungeon to gain evo material and stockpile is great. But in the late game, you'll likely have many copies of a lot of the evo material and thus even if you do get a dublit out of the run, you might not hold onto the other 3-4 spirits (high or low) that you get if you've already got a ton. Even then, you're powerful enough that I think there are better ways to spend your stamina than running the Expert Wed/Fri.

For T5 farming, you don't want to farm the final and first version of the dungeons. Other than Ocean of Heaven, I would farm the third floor since it has the best exp/stam in addition to having a very, very low chance of dropping a Guardian of the appropriate color.

Also, I disagree with your definition of early, middle, and late game. On my main account, I'm well past where you are describing as "Late Game" but I'm clearly not Late Game on my main account. In fact, my new account which is less than a month old is also in this Late Game category since I can and haven beaten all the way to and past Ocean of Heaven (with self-imposed hindrances).

Getting to T5's is getting to mid-game, in my opinion. You're gearing up towards Descends and tackling your first few. Once you're capable of beating and tackling the majority of Descends, you're at lategame, and you get to endgame when you can and have beaten every Descend in addition to Fagan and Legendary Earth (on a relatively consistent basis and not once or twice with stoning).

Thanks for the feedback Esplen. I'll share my thought process on this with you (and maybe address some of this in the guide itself as well, particularly the T5).

Esplen said:

For T5 farming, you don't want to farm the final and first version of the dungeons. Other than Ocean of Heaven, I would farm the third floor since it has the best exp/stam in addition to having a very, very low chance of dropping a Guardian of the appropriate color.

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I used to subscribe to this theory. But that very very low chance is actually why I don't think it's the best level to farm. Bear with me.

The point of farming the T5s is two-fold:
* getting good rank exp/stamina
* getting fodder monsters to level up your monsters

Here are the breakdowns of exp/stamina and max number of drops on 1.5x for Hyperion Lava Flow, for example:

Blazing River (level 1) is 453/stamina with up to 6 fodder (boss level means nothing drops)

Lava Tube (level 3) is 522/stamina with up to 5 fodder (both the boss level *and* the Guardian level mean you only get 5 drops. Knights don't drop on floor 6 either, except very rarely. No idea why this is).

I'll grant that if your focus is exclusively on ranking up, level 3 is better to run than level 1.

However, if you want a balance between both (which is what this guide is going for), L1 is probably better than L3 and I am convinced L5 is *way* ahead of L3. There's negligible rank exp difference between L3 and L5, and you lose an extra chance at level up fodder almost every time you run it. That golem ain't dropping.

Re: mid-game vs. late game, I'm not sure which parts we're disagreeing on here =) but I'll try my best to answer:

Getting to T5's is getting to mid-game, in my opinion.

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Yup, according to these guides it is too. One of the goals listed in the "mid-game" guide is "finish the T4 normals so you can get to the T5s".

In fact, my new account which is less than a month old is also in this Late Game category since I can and haven beaten all the way to and past Ocean of Heaven (with self-imposed hindrances).

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The truth is that there's not a ton of "normal" in-game content; I would venture that depending on the team setup and skill level it's not hard to get to Ocean of Heaven in that time frame, but to me that just means you got to the late game fast. The definitions I am using aren't measured by amount of time it takes to do something; they're more measured by how close you are to where the game is "complete".

and you get to endgame when you can and have beaten every Descend in addition to Fagan and Legendary Earth (on a relatively consistent basis and not once or twice with stoning).

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Fagan and Legendary Earth - those are the end-bosses of this game, so to speak. To me, that's "end of the game" vs endgame. Yeah, there are a bunch of superbosses and after that in Descends, but you're essentially game complete. It's like the Omega Weapons in the Final Fantasies (if that analogy holds). The "end game" would be the 10-20% prior to that point of the game. Once you've regularly beaten these guys - well, you've beaten the game.

Now I will grant you that if I count individual levels, there's a bit of room to redefine. Here's the % of the game you're complete (without Descends) at the end of each marker based on these guides:
Early game: 29% (82 out of 281 levels)
Mid game: 48% (136 out of 281 levels)
Late game: 81% (229 out of 281 levels)

However, the day to day guide for anything beyond late game doesn't actually change significantly. The only major differences are:

Other than that, everything is pretty much the same. T6 locations have 2-3 bosses, so the best locations for farming are still the ones in this guide (both for special dublit cases and for the balance of rank exp/fodder). Your day to day priorities don't change much other than:
* finish the T6s
* finish the last couple of technicals
* fight the bosses

and you're done. I might look at changing the terminology but by the time you've done everything in this guide you're almost finished the game aside from some other farming you may (or may not) want to do.

Great guide. I was just wondering about the weekly schedule. You have #1 run limited dungeons, #2 run Super descend dragons, #3 run Pengdra village? Is Pengdra village worth running over T5 dungeons? The exp/stamina ratio is horrible.

Great guide. I was just wondering about the weekly schedule. You have #1 run limited dungeons, #2 run Super descend dragons, #3 run Pengdra village? Is Pengdra village worth running over T5 dungeons? The exp/stamina ratio is horrible.

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The reason I have Pengdra village up there is because that the unevolved pengdras that drop from here (and they're guaranteed) are good to feed monsters up to level 90, while the evolved ones (and you'll get *at least* 1) are great to feed monsters up to maximum level. While it has a terrible rank exp/stamina ratio, the amount of monster exp you'll get from the runs makes up for it. You're not going to be feeding fodder from the T5s to a level 70 monster - well, you could, but it would take you *forever* to level them up.

I admit that the limited nature of the dungeon probably factors in here - if it were present all the time, my advice would be to run T5s and only run pengdra village if you have monsters above level 60 that you want to level further.

Thanks for the explanation. I thought it was better to farm T5 fodder and level those up to 13-14 and feed them to your main. This gives you ok monster experience but you also get level experience and chances at + eggs. Guess it all depends what you think is more important. You got to remember you still need fodder to feed those Pengdras to get them to max level before feeding. Maybe you can do half PV and half T5s, and use the fodder from T5s to feed Pengdras and then feed Pengdras to main.

Thanks for the explanation. I thought it was better to farm T5 fodder and level those up to 13-14 and feed them to your main. This gives you ok monster experience but you also get level experience and chances at + eggs. Guess it all depends what you think is more important. You got to remember you still need fodder to feed those Pengdras to get them to max level before feeding. Maybe you can do half PV and half T5s, and use the fodder from T5s to feed Pengdras and then feed Pengdras to main.

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It's more the evolved Pengs that are the big deal here, but for sure - this approach works too, it's all about your preferences. I'll put a note in the guide about this variation on the weekend!

I don't really find the T6 normals to be better than the T5s when it comes to farming. Two boss levels on each stage mean you only get max 5 fodder per level for a minor difference in rank exp/stamina. The only value I see in them is the possibility of a dub-mythlit family monster when you run them on a 1.5x drop. Other than that I generally steer away from them.

Just curious tho, you make no mention of Light/Dark Keeper farming. Do you recommend just running Keeper of Rainbow for them or Rainbow/Purple Stone Dragon on Mondays? Do they even have good drop rates in the Stone Dragon dungeons?

Just curious tho, you make no mention of Light/Dark Keeper farming. Do you recommend just running Keeper of Rainbow for them or Rainbow/Purple Stone Dragon on Mondays? Do they even have good drop rates in the Stone Dragon dungeons?

Thanks!

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Thanks a ton, I'm glad you find it helpful!

Generally at late game I recommend just farming the normal Keeper dungeons when you need to stock RGB as either Light or Dark is generally a guaranteed drop on level 5 (with the exception of when a Knight shows up, or when you need to stock KOR (as one of the two of them shows up for certain on level 4). You'll end up with a ton of them by default - I tend to sell/feed them when I have over 10 of one color, and have only had one time in my entire game playing when the number of either Keeper of Light or Keeper of Dark dipped below 5 once I hit that number.

I recommend shifting to running the mystic stone dragon levels once available to specifically get a Light or Dark Keeper on Mondays (or during the week if you are desperate to land a keeper of any kind). I have heard many people say that it's not 100%, but I haven't had a situation yet where one failed to drop so I assume it's still quite high (disclaimer: given my surplus detailed above, it's not like I've run that dungeon tons of times).